Blogs

In a rogue attempt to fix and adapt to Qt 4.2, the track-list widget which is nothing more than the tabular widget at the main window left-pane, has been completely rewritten from scratch. It is now based on the custom scroll-view class, as all other scrollable widgets are, instead of being a natively bloated QTableView derivative. The fine print now says the track-list vs. track-view vertical scrolling is now back to pixel resolution and looks way better too.

But not so fast pal, there's some noticeable drawbacks lurking around and one is certain that quite evident as sessions now load faster :)

It was just yesterday when I've upgraded my laptop to openSUSE 10.2, which went fine by the way. Trouble is, it comes with Qt 4.2.1 and with fingers-crossed I let Qtractor run and/or build for the very first time on that -- as a sidenote, the recent migration went trough Qt 4.1 which was bundled in openSUSE 10.1. The fine print says now that Qtractor works in general on the the new Qt line, but there's a serious issue between the track-list item heights and respective vertical scroll synchronization with the track-view pane, that is the main view in fact :) Good grief, I have to spend some more time digging the QTableView class et al.

Just in time for the Halloween season and without disguise, Qtractor migration to Qt4 is now complete and committed to CVS. The migration process spanned over three precise weeks as one can certainly confirm from the previous posts in this blog.

It was kind of boresome, but it is now done. In fact I can tell that the new Qt4 codebase is almost a complete rewrite from the old Qt3 one. To be fair, almost half of the current 50.000 C++ source-code lines were (re)touched in some way or another, but the core functionality remained fundamentally the same, with some scattered improvements I must say.

After a very busy week, the Qt4 porting of Qtractor is going smoothly but harder than expected. Mostly because of some old habits acquired over several years while doing Qt3 programming, which are now being shifted and deprecated.

The most notorious case seems to be buried under good old QListView class usage, which has been pervasive on most of my GUI coding. Plain substitution by the new convenience View/Model classes, namely QTreeWidget, is indeed the way to go, but is not trivial nor a linear process.

As of today, I started the boring task of migrating Qtractor to Qt4.

As one might know, Qtractor is currently a plain Qt3 application, still in alpha stage of development but already functional. At least you can already do some Audio/MIDI sequencing with it, being its main objective.

The Qt3 to Qt4 source code migration will occur privately and slowly, as time permits and probably it will span for more than a couple of weeks I think. So, in the mean time, enjoy Qtractor in its current Qt3 form, while it lasts.